a million sent to internment camps, and 165,000 deaths in those camps.

A visiting Vietnamese, on learning that I was a Marine Viet vet, said she was glad I'd survived. I replied that I was glad she had, too.

Next time you go out to that nice, little Vietnamese restaurant, remember that a quarter of a million boat people died trying to escape Uncle Ho's welcoming embrace. Four times that number succeeded. If it hadn't been for brave, self-sacrificing, heroes like Jane Fonda, you'd have to eat Mexican, or something.

I'm guessing that other news readers, like Sage, will work, too, but I don't know that.

If you haven't played with podcasts yet, here's a cartoon of how it works.

Start by adding a podcast to your list of news channels. As new broadcasts are added to that channel, they'll appear, newest on top, just like any other blog. Clicking on the link, however, launches your audio player, so it comes pouring out your speakers. Alternatively, it can pour onto your hard disk, ready for download into your MP3 player. Like, for example, your ipod.

Just like text blogs, it looks like you can either make the audio content yourself, or you can just link to other folks' audio content. Right now, I'm an essayist in my text blog, but a linker in podcasts. Go figure.

I'm no jeweler, but I've always thought of Paul Revere as the most famous silversmith in the history of America -- maybe of the world. Now, somehow, describing him as a silversmith does him an injustice?

"Silversmith" or "artist," choose one?

Like to be a true artist you have to pump out stuff as poorly crafted as Jackson Pollock?

The banjo player Pete Czelmowicz -- whom I think of as "Pete C-star" -- takes pictures of cattle for a living. "See this bull? See all his kids? You can buy his sperm for the new, low, low price of ...."

I've seen his pics of people. I'm betting the cows look beautious.

I've spent a lot of time around artistes. Everyone else in my family but me is a professional artist. They all think, "Nice boy. Too bad he doesn't have any talent, can't get a real job."

From just hanging around them, I've learned there are two kinds of artists: the tortured garret residents who talk about how outrageous it is that their federal art grants weren't renewed, and the people who work for a living.

Into the latter category fall people like Bach, who's weekly questions were, "What can I do for this mass that people aren't sick of?" and "You're pregnant again?"

Doing art for a living is just like programming for a living. You look for a gig that pays okay and then try to show off. And you wear through a lot of shoe leather hunting for some niche that everyone else hasn't already gotten to.

Up at the top of that Amazon page, above the picture of the cover, is this:

The Second Coming of Steve Jobsby ALAN DEUTSCHMAN "Andrea "Andy" Cunningham was so tired she got home from work that she went to sleep without checking her answering machine..." (more)SIPs:two moguls

Everything after the author's name is in tiny print. The quote is the beginning of the book, and "more" takes me to the teaser -- a couple of pages from the beginning to entice me to read the book. But "SIPs"?

It's Statistically Improbable Phrases -- in this case, "two moguls" -- a feature I'd never noticed before. This phrase occurs five times in the book, and the link takes you to a list of other books it occurs in. The first book on the list after this one? Here.

and noted that they were actually beetles, albeit beetles that live on slime molds.

Next time he saw me, he thanked me, but said that he was disappointed to learn, from reading it, that the naming was to praise these individuals, not slam them. (The scientists named other species, discovered at the same time, after their wives.)

Be interesting, sociologically, to trace how an explicit homage to the President got distorted, by the time it got to him, into something to be passed around as a derogatory remark. Maybe Ward Churchill could have one of his grad students do a scholarly study on it.

Sunday, April 24, 2005

This morning, the Colorado Daily left another "free paper" in my driveway.

They'd agreed, twice now, not to do this anymore. Today, I'll make another call. Last time, despite a phone message promising to return my phone call within 24 hours, it took three days of calling to get a response.

I think what's driving it is this, which I've written about before. Newspapers are desperate, and don't know what niche to go for.

What worked was pointing out to Tim Siebert, at the Camera, that littering breaks both local and state laws. There are fines and jail time attached to repeated littering. It breaks local and state laws.

While it's glamorous to defend freedom of the press, it's tougher to admit to your journalistic colleagues that you've just gotten out of jail for littering.

I went on to explain that throwing someone in jail for repeatedly ignoring my requests not to drop junk in my yard seemed like overkill -- still does -- but I wanted to agree on some kind of consequence. His just promising not to do it again wasn't working.

Tim agreed to give me a subscription to a paper of my choice if it happened again within a year.

Saturday, April 23, 2005

Another Earth Day has come and gone. In the U.S., private wetlands are finally increasing, air quality is better than any time in recorded history, and New England forests are in better shapethan at any time since the mid-1800s.

Not bad.

In the late 1960's, I remember looking out the window on the 10th floor of Millikan library, at CalTech, and just being able to make out the tops of the palm trees two blocks away. That's smog. Two decades later, they'd put in mountains.

Over 70% of Americans surveyed say that they're now pleased with the condition of their environment. Anti-Bush activists are reduced to NYT-like, "fake-but-accurate" reporting about the Bush administration's environmental policies.

Good environmental news, I'd say.

This afternoon, I'm playing a gig for the University of Colorado Environmental Center. It'll be interesting to see what I hear.

Thursday, April 21, 2005

Long ago, Jeff Garvey, city employee, explained it to me: people who stay in government aren't motivated by money -- they're motivated by power.

Now notes Glen Reynolds: "My historian-brother often says that one of the most interesting phenomena that he's observed is the cross-cultural willingness of people to trade away economic benefits for status. I suspect that this is one example of that. So, in a surprisingly similar way, is being a politician."

Monday, April 18, 2005

My father, a portrait painter, would get pooh-poohed for doing representational art when it was as out of fashion as Gully Jimson's father. "Why would anyone want to just be a poor imitation of a camera?"

He once remarked to me that we've all seen photos that don't look like us, when, of course, they look exactly like us -- the camera can't lie. Making a picture look like the subject is more than just putting the right pixels in the right places.

The Volokh Conspiracy notes this here, in another twist on the "fake-but-accurate" theme.Fittingly, the "accurate but fake" nature of the "Constitution in Exile" story is best illustrated—literally—by the unrecognizable morgue photos of Richard Epstein and Michael Greve—both would be completely unrecognizable to me had I not read who they were supposed to be—and the "Snidely Whiplash" picture of Chip Mellor.

Sunday, April 17, 2005

Text-based browsers, like links, are cool because they're fast. On the other hand, if the site is inherently complex, the browser still has to draw stuff. Moreover, you have to have a box that runs them. Links runs on either Linux or OS/2, for example.

MIT's been looking at server-side simplification, which is a great service both forpeople in third-world countries who have low-end computers and very low bandwidth. Knowing about this also lets you impress women you date who still only have dialup connections.

Friday, April 15, 2005

People who've never done science seem not to get excited by beautiful, unexpected observations that don't lead to new conclusions. Here's a good example: an article about someone who found a way to resurrect long-gone plankton and sees that -- yep -- their evolution follows the patterns you'd expect.

Thursday, April 14, 2005

The first comment in this slashdot article suggests a lovely way to build my patent portfolio. Seems like a straghtforward hack to the original software, which is publicly available, might do the trick.

For me, one of the most unexpected social changes of the new millenium has been the death of the newspaper.

The withering away of ABC/NBC/CBS was predictable, once cable appeared, and the suicides of CBS News and the BBC were just embarrassing implementation details.

In contrast, the withdrawal of the L.A. Times from the national market, the Jayson Blair/Howell Raines scandal, the misreporting of Afghanistan/Iraq, and the dive in advertising revenues, though, were much bigger deals than most people -- or at least than I -- noticed as they were happening.

Blogs and Craig's List seemed just to be there, one day. Remember how only geeks had computers and you went out for coffee and by the time you got home everyone was giving you his email address and "togoogle" was a verb? Same feel.

It's as big and fanfare-less a change as the quiet death of radio. And, just as talk radio gave the medium a new life and new face, 50 years later, I'll bet that newspapers will be reborn in 50 years in some form that none of us can predict today.

Meanwhile, they'll have to find some niche market to keep them alive. Radio survived through Top-40 stations. What will it be for newspapers? The National Enquirer?

Monday, April 11, 2005

Waiting for Electronic Weather

I'm blogging from a coffee shop in St. Louis, Missouri, listening to a webcast of Mary Cox, playing "Dixie," on http://sugarinthegourd.com.

My band came out to play a dance. I was supposed to fly home yesterday (Sunday). Denver International Airport is closed. 30 inches of snow, winds blowing so hard that they closed the highway to DIA, and 1,500 people without power. United says they might be able to get me out on Tuesday.

I take my laptop down to a local coffee shop that has free wireless, open it up, and I'm blogging, listening to music through headphones, and exchanging email with FrankLee, who's painting in North Carolina. If someone needs to call me, my cell phone's in my breast pocket.

Me, I'm living in the 21st century. The weather's still living in the 19th.

White Box Linux's initial creation has been sponsored by the Beauregard Parish Public Library in DeRidder, LA USA out of self interest. We have several servers and over fifty workstations running Red Hat Linux and were left high and dry by their recent shift in business plan. Our choices were a difficult migration to another distribution or paying RedHat an annual fee greater than the amortized value of our hardware. So we chose a third path, made possible by the power of Open Source.... White Box Linux.

First, necessity is the mother of invention, and the Linux community is performing some very active midwifery.

The space increase had to happen, too. Google started by giving users 1G apiece. I've been telling anyone who'd listen that this limit was token -- that they might as well have said they were giving us a terabyte. Disk capacities grow so fast that by the time anyone hits a gig, they'll be giving everyone ten. (Hitachi's making me look smarter every day.)

Deleting email is history.

And, as of today, Google maps has satellite pictures. I can see your house from up here. This was a welcome development; the Keyhole stuff has been, until now, confined to proprietary platforms, and I was worried because it was taking so long to appear for the rest of us.

High-resolution photos are still confined to the U.S. and Canada, but if you zoom out, you can scroll around the world -- literally. Go west and you end up where you started. Magellan would be proud.

Looks like the pictures are from the summertime. Greenland's a solid sheet of ice, but Alaska's mostly green.

If the Vatican just chucks this complex process and lets the Main Stream Media appoint Popes, it won't end up with any more dismal failures, like John Paul II, and will no longer have to contend with awkward problems like this one.

The mathematician gets out a tape measure and has the statistician stand on one end. He pulls it out, reads off the statistician's height, and announces he's exactly two pi feet tall.

He offers the tape to the statistician. The statistician waves it off, and then asks the next 50 passers by how tall the mathematician is. This, the statistician explains, is better because it provides both a mean and a variance.

New, Cool Stuff at Bloglines, Gmail

A week or so ago, Yahoo announced that it was meeting Gmail's bid by bumping email storage limits to a Gig. Today, Gmail raised them to 2 Gig. Also, they seem to be importing markup facilities from Blogger, which they now own. You can adjust fonts, colors, etc., in your email.

I'm not sure how they're doing it, but the rich-text stuff just appeared on my account, and I've been watching my limit rise through the day. It's still hanging around 1.7 Gig, but I expect it to be at 2 by tomorrow.